Cwicly Discontinued! What is next?

If you are a WordPress developer or designer, you might have heard of Cwicly. This is a modern page builder with a promising future as an alternative for established players like Elementor, Divi, and Oxygen. It was a great alternative to the other page builders because it was based on Gutenberg which we consider the future of WordPress as it is the native way to create blogs and User Interfaces graphically.

Unfortunately, the Cwicly team has decided to stop development immediately and refund everyone who bought the plugin in 2024. This is sad news considering that this new page builder was getting popular and adding new features almost weekly. Even worse is the reason behind the sudden stop. Louis mentions harsh criticism from WordPress “Influencers” that took a toll on the team’s morale, which is doing development and design for this plugin more out of love than profit. This is a cautionary tale for anyone involved in tech because other people including influencers might put a target on these new plugins just for the sake of getting likes, views, or being involved in the competition.

When we provide feedback or criticize a product, it is important to understand that a team of hard-working people is behind it. Those people have invested hundreds or thousands of working hours on a product. They have sacrificed their time, money, and effort to get something to the public. We don’t use Cwicly in our projects, but we understand the benefits of having another competitor in the community as it pushes others to innovate.

At least, there is light at the end of the tunnel because the team has decided to maintain Cwicly past the end of the year but with no features added or planned in the future. This is a big step considering that they decided to stop the development fully by the end of 2024. Thus, there is still a chance of seeing this plugin come to light and push other builders or similar products to innovate.

If you just started working on a site using Cwicly, be happy that it will continue support so you don’t fall into the trap of having problems with security or having to rebuild the entire site with another plugin. However, if you are planning on designing a site with it, it is better to look for other Gutenberg builders or traditional page builders instead so you don’t depend on a plugin that won’t include any new features in a constantly evolving field.